Posted on 27 April 2011

Today, I was trying to setup Apple’s iChat application for connecting with my Google Talk
account. I have been using a Mac for over two years now, but my primary machine was always
a Windows one. For some reason, I had to setup the Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard as
the active machine.

As with every geek, setting up IM, Mail, Chrome etc. take a precedence than setting up the
IDE. So here I was trying to connect iChat 5 with my Google Account. At first it seemed
so simple, you start iChat, it gives you an option to setup the chat account, choose
Google Account, enter your credentials and you are done. Voilla. But life is not so
simple. After a couple of minutes I got the following error,

“iChat could not connect to host talk.google.com”

To anyone geeky, this sounds like a network issue and without Googling I started to troubleshoot
my network settings, firewall access, and network connectivity. After I had spend many minutes
wasting, I realized it was nothing to do with connectivity. It was something else. I went
ahead and read almost all forums that summarize the issue. They vary from firewall issues
to router issues.

But none of them seemed to be the case, as on the same wire my Windows machine could connect.
Running a Windows VM on my Mac machine worked as well, so the issue was definitely not with
the firewall settings as well. Lastly I found
this post on
Apple Forums, of a user who had a similar issue. The trick was to use the host name as
gmail.com and port as 443.

Not sure why, but it worked and here I am blogging on the same so that I can easily recall
the issue a few days later if I hit the same road block again. Yes, I am a geek but I still
can’t recall solutions to errors a couple of days later, and I am proud of it.

If this helps you, all credit goes to
Ralph Johns for helping souls like me.